29 February 2012 5:41 PM

Before I begin, perhaps I could be told in what way I don’t understand what ‘begging the question’ means? I always love a bit of pedantry.

Now, to business. Some contributors here are engaging in what I regard as a straightforward smear campaign, on the basis that I have offered a limited defence of Vladimir Putin and (much more importantly) an attack on his critics for inconsistency, for being themselves critical of Mr Navalny, as they would be if he were not their ally.

I have also criticised the wider inconsistency of liberal interventionists, who condemn Mr Putin for wrongs he has committed, but overlook identical or comparable wrongs in other countries and other leaders. Once again, inconsistent outrage is phoney outrage.

I will repeat here a comment I placed on the ‘If not Putin, who? thread:

‘A contributor hiding behind the name of 'Dr Finlay' (A.J.Cronin's amusing creation), asserts :'This piece has interesting similarities to those written by left-wing US intellectuals who visited the "workers' paradise" of the USSR in the 20s and 30s and to those written by English right-wingers who visited Herr Hitler in the 30s. They were misguided and so are you.' What an extraordinary claim. I suspect its author, whose real identity we'll probably never know, will never appear here again and so won't answer this. But in case he has the courage of his anonymous convictions, perhaps he could give some evidence of the alleged similarity. I see none ( these people, well-described in David Caute's 'The Fellow Travellers' and , interestingly, also examined in detail in my discussion of the Webbs in my book 'The Rage Against God', closed their eyes to the faults of the Soviet regime for reasons of ideological sympathy. Mr Putin has no ideology for me to sympathise with.

'Nor did I in any way seek to hide or minimise the evils of his regime. On the contrary, as any fair reader must surely accept. Nor was I conducted through Moscow by state officials. Most of those who helped me, and spoke to me were as it happens opponents and critics of Mr Putin, all of them entirely independent of the state, and it was through them that I found Dmitry, which is why I was sure he wasn't a plant. I might also add that Russia still has a surprisingly free press (journals with small circulations can say pretty much what they like, it is only when they become seriously influential that they come under state pressure) and little is hidden. Nor was I an innocent. Unlike the fellow travellers of the 1920s and 1930s, I lived in Russia for more than two years, speak a little of the language, have independent sources of knowledge there, and some experience of the way in which the country works. Unlike the correspondents of the time, I wasn't under pressure to conform to a pro-government line to keep my job (see the accounts of the business by reporters such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons etc) I will ignore the other comparison, which is simply a stupid insult, and presumably the reason why the contributor lacked the courage to say who he really is. I assume the apparent supporter of Colonel Gadaffi posting here is in fact a fake, trying to be satirical on the 'Borat' model, If he's a real person, perhaps he could say so, and explain a little more about himself.’

I don’t seem to have had any proper response to this, which seems to me to deal with and dispose of the claim that my article is in any way comparable to such stuff.

The allegation is baseless, and purely designed to smear me, by confusing the ill-informed.

Now along comes Mr ‘Candide III’ (what happened to the first two?) to say I suffer from ‘an unwillingness to examine or search for uncomfortable facts’

Oh, yeah?.

Who wrote this then:’ Mr Putin is without doubt a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government. His private life and wealth are a mystery. His personality cult – bare-chested tough-guy, horseman, diver, jet pilot – is creepy and would be laughable if it were not a serious method of keeping power. The lawless jailing of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky is his direct fault. The hideous death in custody of the courageous lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is a terrible blot on Putin’s thuggish state. The murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko are symptoms of the sickness of modern Russia. ‘The general cynicism of the Russian government is breathtaking’ ?

Why, I did. How can this be squared with the accusation above? What unwillingness to search for or examine uncomfortable facts? Precisely the same facts were to be found in an article taking the opposite position by my old friend Edward Lucas, published in the Daily Mail two days after mine had been published in the Mail on Sunday.

I think any search of the laudatory books, articles and statements of fellow-travellers of any or all of the totalitarian or authoritarian regimes of modern history would not be able to uncover a comparable passage. Perhaps one of my critics would care to try.

Now we come to Mr ‘Andrew Wyke’ who in two separate comments (one on ‘Our Laws…’ and one on ’Morals, Mr Putin…’ attempts to suggest that I am in some way allied to National Socialists. He does this with some serpentine subtlety (The old technique of saying that he, Mr Wyke is of course not suggesting this, but that people may think it). Example:

‘Anyone who gives the BNP’s manifesto just a cursory glance will see that Peter Hitchens and Nick Griffin more often than not agree on both ’leftist’ economic and ’rightist’ social policies. This is not for one moment intended to suggest that Peter Hitchens has arrived at his agenda from the same perspective as the overtly racist Ku Klux Klan-styled Nick Griffin. But my point is that the vast majority of casual observers out there may not realize this’

Well, as a swift check of ‘BNP’ in the index will show, they have no actual excuse for 'failing to realise this', and it is a smear that has been rebutted and in my view utterly refuted here many times before. If this is a real person, and he intends to stay here, Mr ‘Wyke’, if such he be, may need to come to some understanding about such claims if he wishes to carry on posting here. But my suspicion is that like ‘Dr Finlay’ we will not hear back from him, at least under that name.

Mr ‘Wyke’ uses precisely the same reptilian technique when he seeks to endorse ‘Dr Finlay’.( who alleged ‘This piece has interesting similarities to those written by left-wing US intellectuals who visited the "workers' paradise" of the USSR in the 20s and 30s and to those written by English right-wingers who visited Herr Hitler in the 30s. They were misguided and so are you.’

Mr ‘Wyke concludes ‘ Despite Mr Hitchens’ protestations, this is precisely how most people (beyond the Daily Mail’s core National Socialist readership) will perceive his comments about Russia.

Ah, they will *perceive* them in this way, will they ? I wonder how he knows (see below) But will they be right and just to do so? Surley that is the point. But is he interested in the pursuit of the truth

Mr Wyke then reveals something interesting about himself, to which I would draw the reader’s attention. He speaks of ‘the Daily Mail’s core National Socialist readership’

I must ask Mr ‘Wyke’, if he exists, what he means by this extraordinary throwaway slur, buried in what appears to be a generally rational argument (this may be too kind, on second thoughts. Quite a lot of the contribution by Mr ‘Wyke’ is swirling pigswill, actually, see below ), what his evidence is for it and if this sort of thing does not reveal him to be some sort of ultra-dogmatic leftist who adjusts the facts to fit his world-view.

It is as if a bank-manager at a Rotary dinner, in the midst of a speech on savings regulation, suddenly begins to take off his clothes and shout ’cock-a-doodle do!’.

Everything that has gone before, and all that comes afterwards, seems in some way less convincing.

He then says ‘Dr Finlay is not calling Mr Hitchens a Nazi-sympathizer or some kind of communist fossil,’

1 . How does he know the inner thoughts of ‘Dr Finlay’? How well-acquainted are they with each other?

2. Actually, it seems to me that this is precisely what ’Finlay’ is seeking to suggest.. ‘They are misguided, and so are you’. Well if we are not misguided in the same way, what does that matter? But that is the insinuation, as who can really doubt?

Interesting that this should be stimulated by an article which points out the dubious and *actual* ultra-nationalist past of Mr Navalny, the hero of the anti-Putinites, who prefer to ignore or avoid this awkward fact.

Mr ‘Wyke’ trundles out the ancient facts about the long-dead Lord Rothermere and his long-ago flirtation with Oswald Mosley and his befuddled remarks about Hitler.Many others, including I think Winston Churchill himself, were willing to say favourable things about Hitler and Mussolini, when they were merely bloodstained killers and tyrants, rather than enemies in war and (in Hitler’s case) a racialist mass-murderer. All regretted it and repudiated their support, I think (unlike many Stalin supporters who continued to their graves making excuses for Communism, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm still does). Generally, those who get exercised about Rothermere don’t get exercised about Stalin’s apologists. I have always thought the worse of both.

Conservatism is not ‘fundamental to fascist ideology’ first because this use of ‘Fascism’ to describe parties and states other than those specifically called ‘fascist’ is itself either a giveaway of Mr Wyke’s political sympathies, or shows him to be very ignorant of the origin of such things.. It is a propaganda concept adopted by the USSR in 1941 to avoid embarrassment over the rather recent (1939) Nazi-Soviet pact, and the phrase ‘National Socialism’. Given that Communist and National Socialist troops had recently marched in a joint victory parade through the formerly Polish city of Brest-Litovsk (film exists) the expression ‘National Socialism’ was unwelcome in the USSR. Also it was itself not all that different from Stalin’s ‘Socialism in One Country’ . Fascism doesn’t really have an ideology, but to the extent that it is sustained by any ideas at all, they are corporate, statist and far from conservative. As for the separate phenomenon of National Socialism, the clue’s in the name.

Mr Wyke continues ‘The Daily Mail even warned about the ‘flood’ of European Jews entering Britain fleeing persecution at the hands of the Nazis. Which does kind of explode Mr Hitchens’ frequent assertion that the British knew little of the Nazi persecution of the Jews at the time we (belatedly) declared war on Germany.’

I have never, let alone frequently, made any such assertion. This is another smear. I have said that the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews did not begin until after the war had begun (in fact not until after the invasion of the USSR) and that Britain did not go to war with Germany to save the Jews (nor did she succeed in saving any, unless you count as ‘;saved’ those left still alive in the death camps at the end of the war, whom we did not life a finger to save, while busily bombing German civilians. In any case, it is regrettably true that the Red Army played a bigger part in their rescue than we did).

The Daily Mail was obviously wrong to speak in such terms. Who would disagree? Does he think I do? Am I in some way responsible for the repudiated remarks of a long-dead proprietor of the Daily Mail? How? If not, why mention it? (Smear, of course).

I am then accused of saying that ‘Vladimir Putin is some kind of paragon of virtue and common sense when it comes to interference in the internal affairs of other nations’.

No, I did not use such terms. I certainly said nothing about virtue. Nor did I use the word paragon. I was careful to list his crimes. But I explained why he is selectively hated for crimes which , in other countries, and committed by other leaders, western media ignore or excuse. Selective outrage, I say again, is phoney. Mr ‘Wyke’ makes no attempt to engage with this point because he cannot. He prefers the smear.

He winds up with some foolish drivel about religion, which he plainly doesn’t understand, and then says ;’ I find it rather disturbing that Mr Hitchens has nicer things to say about the likes of Putin, Assad and Gaddafi than he does about Cameron, Mandela or Obama.’

I have never said anything ‘nice’ about either Muammar Gadaffi or Bashar Assad. I doubt very much if Mr Putin thinks I have said anything ‘nice’ about him (let me repeat he is ‘a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government’) I have in fact said complimentary things about David Cameron (recently here about his response to the Bloody Sunday inquiry report) , and I am happy to say here again , as I’ve said many times elsewhere, that Barack Obama is an engaging person and a fine writer. I think I have also said that Nelson Mandela’s generosity and forbearance are praiseworthy, as they are, though he also has many faults, including his friendship with, er, Muammar Gadaffi, and has served to provide a front for the very much less lovely ANC.

Mr Wyke writes as if he knows what he is talking about and has researched my past statements and views. But he doesn’t. And he hasn’t. What’s dispiriting about this is that his nasty smears are an irrational and spiteful response to what is basically a reasonable dissenting opinion, thoughtfully expressed. And that I have yet to see any of the more sensible contributors defend me against this sort of thing. I think that if people like Mr ‘Wyke’ get away with this stuff, the whole tone of this site sinks.

I should obviously have dealt with several other subjects. But when I’m smeared I must defend myself, or it goes out on the web unchallenged.

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It can be frustrating to reply carefully to comments and then find that the person involved simply isn’t interested in listening to the response. We all know about Mr ‘Bunker’ (and when I’ve time I plan to produce a list of all the questions put to him by me and others last week, to which he has not responded).

But here I’m dealing with ‘Elaine’ who seems surprised that I actually believe the things I say, and criticises me for saying that ‘the "running in this has been made from the start by the USA"

She ripostes : ‘The problem is that the many responses to the uprisings; that is, those from the Syrian exiles, from the British and French, from the UN, from the Turks and from the Arab League have come all along the way and are well documented, so the facts do not support this assertion. So what if the US ambassador to Syria openly supported the protestors? He was not interjecting himself into some disagreement over their constitution or some economic policy. He was responding to the arrests and shootings of peaceful protestors. So, the time for diplomatic niceties was over. It would have been extraordinary if he hadn't spoken out when hundreds and thousands of people were being murdered.’.

Well, would it? (See Bahrain, below) The US Ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford, went to Hama, a well-known centre of the Muslim Brotherhood, in early July when the Syrian troubles were still quite minor (New York Times, 9th July 2011). He went with the French ambassador, Eric Chevalier, choosing a Thursday and a Friday, the Muslim Sabbath and invariably the time of greatest protest.

On 13th July, he was rewarded with the following interesting editorial comment on the liberal interventionist ‘Washington Post’ (expressing sentiments with which ‘Elaine’ doubtless agrees)

‘After months of hesitation, the Obama administration has finally recognized what the people of Syria have been making clear for the past four months: that President Bashar al-Assad "has lost legitimacy" and "failed to deliver on the promises he has made," as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton put it on Monday. "President Assad is not indispensable and we have absolutely nothing invested in him remaining in power," Ms. Clinton said. That qualifies as news: For months the administration behaved as if it wished to preserve Mr. Assad as a guarantor of stability in his country or a potential peace partner with Israel. Up until this week it has described political reforms led by him as a potential solution to the country's crisis.

‘Sadly, the event that appeared to trigger the change in rhetoric was not the continuing slaughter by Mr. Assad's forces of the courageous Syrians who have turned out in dozens of cities and villages to demand an end to his dictatorship. Instead, the tougher language followed an assault on the U.S. Embassy and ambassador's residence in Damascus that was carried out by thugs who were bused in by the regime and that was orchestrated by one of its television stations. The mob smashed windows, hurled rocks and tomatoes and painted slogans before moving on to the French Embassy, which they also attacked.

'Some Syrians may wonder why an ugly but non-lethal incursion on Western diplomatic property got a reaction that the slaughter of some 1,500 people with tanks and helicopter gunships failed to elicit. But we hope they will also remember the superb diplomacy of U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert S. Ford, who, like his French counterpart, traveled last week to the city of Hama, which has been taken over by the opposition. Mr. Assad's tanks ring the city, and many residents fear a murderous assault. The American ambassador's presence may have forestalled such an attack; it also allowed Mr. Ford to observe and report that, contrary to the regime's propaganda, the Hama protesters were unarmed and have not attacked government buildings or officials.

‘ Mr. Ford's mission was a demonstration that - despite what is frequently heard from administration officials in Washington - it is possible for the United States to help Syrians free themselves from the Assad dictatorship. Declaring Mr. Assad "illegitimate" is an important signal; it would have still more impact if President Obama, who has spoken publicly on Syria only twice in four months, were to give Mr. Assad the same rhetorical shove he delivered to Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Moammar Gaddafi.’

So if it is ‘possible for the USA to help Syrians free themselves from the Assad dictatorship’, how is that to be achieved? And what sort of government does the USA (which achieved the exact opposite of its intentions in Iraq) hope to obtain, and how does it hope to obtain it?

If it has no plans for direct intervention, it is licensing a civil war of unpredictable duration in which thousands of innocents will inevitably die . Civil wars are pretty much the worst sort of war to be caught in, if you are a woman, a child or a non-combatant.

As for who will succeed Assad, all the portents (as they did in Egypt, quite correctly despite the scoffing of various interventionist ‘experts’) point to more power for the Muslim Brotherhood, probably backed by Saud Salafists. I should be interested to know which aspects a) of civil war and b) of a Muslim Brotherhood despotism in a country with large Christian and Shia minorities, Eliane looks forward to most.

Except, of course, I forgot. The end result will be a western-style democracy, won’t it?

Protest in Syria had, as it happens, begun to grow in mid-March 2011. Serious violence, but limited to small areas, began in April. The US imposed sanctions on 29th April. But until Assad allowed/encouraged attacks on the US and French embassies in Damascus in July, Mrs Clinton did not really come down firmly for regime change, though she has never said what sort of new regime she desires. It is very likely to be a Sectarian Sunni Muslim regime, based upon the Muslim brotherhood. I repeat : Has she (or Elaine?) ever wondered what that might be like for non-Sunni Muslims now in Syria?

And, I might add, until then most interventionist media coverage and interest was concentrated in Libya and Egypt. I wonder when ‘Elaine’ began to be interested in the suffering of the Syrians.

The transformation of the Syrian unrest into a full-scale armed uprising (armed by whom?) really began only around July, and the current terrifying state of war seems to me to be largely the consequence of the USA taking its current stance.

What ‘Elaine’ has to explain is (as I originally asked) how she thinks this benefits the actual people of Syria, amidst whom this war is fought.

I grieve for all innocent persons caught in war, but never for anyone who has fomented such a war, or desired it, or helped to cause it. My position is consistent.

Is the position of ‘Elaine’ consistent? What, for instance, is the view of ‘Elaine’ about the uprising in Bahrain, cruelly crushed by Saudi forces, with the endorsement of the Gulf Co-operation Council and the acquiescence of the USA. I have heard ( has anyone else?) no reports of the US Ambassador to Bahrain touring rebel zones to give them comfort.

The International Herald Tribune of 27th August 2010 recorded, after a long account of unpleasant repression, ‘Opposition leaders have also accused the United States of turning a blind eye.

‘In a telephone interview, the American ambassador, J. Adam Ereli, responded: ‘‘Bahrain is important to the United States for security issues. But that doesn’t mean we don’t raise human rights issues as well.’’’

Well I never.

As I have stated before, and I do not withdraw from it, Hitchens’s rule of moral outrage on the part of journalists and foreign ministries is clear. If the outrage is selective, it is phoney. It has another purpose. If Elaine’s outrage is genuine, as it may well be, then rather than lecturing me she should contact her government and ask it why it is outraged by Syrian repression, but not by that in Bahrain (two hints – just as Syria is a Russian naval base, Bahrain is a base for the USN. And Saudi Arabia is involved. And the protestors in Bahrain are Shias, hated by Saudi Arabia, not Salafists or Muslim brothers backed by Saudi Arabia).

Part two : ‘Dialogues of the Deaf- Russia’ will follow when I have time

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28 February 2012 11:58 AM

Mr Bumstead chides me for favouring Christianity and then refusing to join in the standard-issue condemnation of Vladimir Putin. My own view remains, as it always has done, that Christianity’s force is exercised through the individual, not through the state, and that the best kind of state is that which leaves the individual freedom of conscience and action. It’s my view that if Protestant Christianity is widespread in such a state, then it is possible to attain a pretty high level od ordered liberty, such as existed here and in the USA until recently.

I use the expression ‘Protestant Christianity’ not out of sectarianism, as I regard all Christians as allies in general, but because I think this is a matter of fact. Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity seem to me to ask different things of their adherents, and to be more compatible with autocratic and authoritarian strong states. This begs the question, as I well know, of whether a state that is not strong, and not based upon a large army, could ever flourish except in a place with strong natural defences of sea, mountains or desert. I suspect not. Whoever heard of a naval dictatorship? (and before anyone mentions the Regent Horthy, the Admiral no longer had a fleet by the time he came to power).

So I don’t see any special contradiction. I hardly think Mr Putin, or his English-speaking spin doctor, will regard my article as an endorsement. I was careful not to skip over, minimise or excuse any of his faults or misdeeds. But it is in the nature of Kingship since the Biblical rule of David that it has never been unmixed with evil, and human power never will be. Whatever politician you admire – Roosevelt( the Japanese round-up) Truman ()the destroying two entire Japanese cities and their people), Churchill(the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg) , Lincoln( suspension of Habeas Corpus), Attlee (the Potsdam agreement and its implementation) there’s always a dark side. Part of the point of religious belief is the understanding that truth, virtue and justice have an everlasting home, not an earthly one. That doesn’t emna we can;’t engage in sensible argument about the virtues and vices of politicians, or endorse some f their actions.

One of the key parts of my article was the point that the criticism of Putin was *selective*, ie others had done things just as bad, and were either endorsed or given a free pass by the people who claimed to find these things unacceptable in Putin. As I’ve said many times and very recently, if outrage is selective, then it is also phoney.

Mr Bumstead also says that Putin ‘intervenes in other countries’ and cites Chechnya (which is in fact part of Russian National territory and has never been recognised as an independent state in modern times) , and Georgia, which , as I explained in the article and Mr Bumstead does not dispute, started the war with Russia. Russia withdrew its troops almost immediately, and its recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was under extreme provocation from Mr Saakashvili (whose appalling record Mr Bumstead seems to prefer to ignore, this demonstrating the selectivity which renders his snooty view of Putin more or less worthless).

I think Mr Bumstead is wrong in fact about Gadaffi, who was , or thought he was, a friend of the West. Alas for him, he was not an friend of the Saudis or of al Jazeera, whoever controls the editorial policy of that interesting TV station. I also think that if Putin, rather than Medvedev, had been President at the time, Russia would have vetoed the Libyan no-fly zone. And while Russia is doubtless interested in maintaining its naval base in Syria, I think its interest in refusing to join the orchestrated overthrow of the Assad regime has a wider purpose. Hence China’s support .

Who really cares if the European Union and the Arab League also support intervention in Syria? (Apart from Elaine, that is, who seems set on pursuing the 'Arab Spring' whatever horrors it brings to actual Arabs, in the name of some unattainable utopia of western-style 'democracy' in the Middle East. Ho Ho). The running in this has been made from the start by the USA, whose ambassador's extraordinary behaviour last spring and summer (more or less open sympathy for the protestors, boldly expressed) seems to me to be an entirely new type of diplomacy. Of course an embassy keeps contacts with dissidents and opposition figures. But the ambassador himself normally stays above such things, as he is the personal representative of the Head of State, and his very presence at an event or meeting is a policy statement. Several thoughts arise. First, did the anti-Assad movement conclude from the ambassador's behaviour that, if they kept on pushing, American material help would arrive? In which case, doesn't the USA bear some responsibility for the horrors now taking place, especially given that it seems unlikely it ever intended to intervene with force?

Second, in whose interests was this diplomacy? Israel would prefer a stable Syria. Christians would generally prefer the Assad regime, as Syria is now about the only major Arab country where they are protected and not persecuted. But Saudi Arabia, whose interests seem to be the only ones consistently served by the 'Arab Spring' would certainly be pleased to hit at Iran (its hated Shia enemy) by destabilising Iran's principal Arab ally, namely Syria. It might make up for the disaster of the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, which untintentionally turned that country in Iran's second-bigegst Arab ally. So much for any idea that thesew people know what they are doing. n

Any study of Putin in power ( I recommend Angus Roxburgh’s recent book on the subject) shows clearly that his Russian patriotism is genuine and his interest in national sovereignty is a very important part of his personality and policy. Roxburgh's section on the Georgian conflict is also very interesting for anyone who ahs hitherto bought the generlaly-accepted pro-Saakashvili version.

I am asked, in what way and in what direction is Putin driving Russia? My answer, in the direction of national self-determination, which may conceivably end in a more stable, peaceful and lawful Russia than the one we have at the moment. Whatever it ends in, I suspect it will be better than the foreign-directed bazaar which took place in the Yeltsin years, better for Russia, Russians and ultimately the world.

Mr Kogatov says I ‘forgive’ Mr Putin his evil deeds. I don’t think I said that. It’s not for me, in any case, to forgive things done to others. What I do is to say that these evil deeds are selectively fastened on by commentators who *do* forgive similar evil deeds done by others. I know perfectly well why so many Russians resent Putin. People always resent their rulers, especially after they have been in office for 12 years. But that is not a coherent programme. Nor is Mr Navlny as nice as he looks. Nor do I think that a shiny manifesto full of activity is necessarily a sign of a good government. We have had plenty of those in Britain these last few years.

Mr Kogatov doesn’t really answer the question of how the anti-Putin forces would act if they managed to topple Mr Putin? Who would they put in his place? Many Russians fear it would be the western ‘market forces’ that devastated their lives in the Yeltsin era. I think they may be on to something.

On the matter of the Tappin extradition. I have today spoken to someone who has had a chance to talk at length to Mr Tappin (and incidentally views him as most unlikely to be guilty) . I’d point out that he absolutely disputes one of the suggestions in the court documents – that he used a false name. The name referred to is, he maintains, the name of a colleague at his company, and was properly used by that person. We haven't heard this on oath, so it's not evidence and no court can consider it . Yet if this is so, then the whole view changes , doesn’t it? Now, anyone who has ever attended a trial or even seen a dramatic portrayal of one knows how the picture changes once both sides have called their witnesses and made their cases. What we see in these documents is only one side, for reasons explained below.

Now, if there’d been a proper hearing of the case, then that would have been admissible. But the extradition treaty doesn’t require that, and so we rely on the ‘Grand Jury’ indictment which (as I repeatedly point out) took place at a secret hearing where the defence were not represented. Because of the unequal treaty, the judges could only rule on technicalities connected to extradition law, not on the case itself. They are not ruling on evidence when they make their decisions. They are ruling on grounds for refusing an extradition, a much more technical matter, tightly circumscribed by precedent as they don’t want the humiliation of having their judgement overturned in a higher court. That’s the whole point of the unequal treaty. The Defence must be extremely lucky to halt an extradition, even though the evidence against the accused is scanty. I wonder if any criminal lawyer reading this reckons that British prosecuting authorities could extradite a US citizen with the evidence arrayed against Mr Tappin, or could provide any examples of such a case since the new treaty came into force.

When I described the case as ‘murky’, I was not referring to the judgement, but to the way in which US government employees set up a shell company and in my view were not entirely frank about themselves to Mr Tappin and others, to the way in which he was told that an associate who had been arrested was unavailable because he had been in a (fictitious) car accident . I would also draw attention to the curious delay in bringing this case at all. As I have said, there is a lack of persuasive evidence that Mr Tappin (who is by the way not rich by any modern standards, and stood to make very little by this deal) had any idea that he was involved in any dishonest enterprise.

Mr Thorne says that the US Bill of Rights applies to US citizens only. Not so. It applies to anyone tried on US soil.

Mr ‘Potkas’ says I am only offering a layman’s opinion. Well, of course I am and so is he ( and so would any juror who eventually sat on the case, if such were ever to happen) . But I am also employing, as he is not, the presumption of innocence common to both jurisdictions. Therefore I do not accept as unchallenged fact the prosecution’s submissions to the Grand Jury, where the defence were not even present. In English law the Judges rule on law and the (Petty, ie trial) Jury, which hears both sides of the case (unlike the Grand Jury, which hears only one side) on facts as well (the US system is derived from the English). But in extradition to the US the evidence bar is extremely low, and the Judges can only rule on law, not on guilt or innocence.

Mr Hunt says ’ Mr Hitchens says two wrongs have never made a right. Except, for him, in the case of state administered capital punishment. Where suddenly and miraculously it does’. I do not understand. I think the execution of properly convicted murders is just, morally correct and right. How can it therefore be said that my support for capital punishment means that I think two wrongs make a right. Which is the second wrong?

More cogently, he says : ‘If we don't like unequal extradition laws, why not argue to balance the playing field?’, to which I reply, that is exactly what I am arguing for – an equal treaty, as existed before, where it was as hard for the US to extradite from here, as it was for us to extradite from there. Likewise the abolition of the EU arrest warrant.

In reply to ‘Bob son of Bob’, I think he will find if he studies the history of post-colonial Somalia that it was used as a Cold War proxy battleground, and that in recent years the ridiculous identification of the ‘Islamic Courts’ with the mythical bogey ‘Al Qaeda’ resulted in a needless prolongation of a disastrous civil war.

He then says : ‘“I also learned not to be too unkind to those who made compromises with it (communism).” This is a sentiment that is not extended by Peter Hitchens to George Bush in his compromises with the IRA.’

I really cannot see any parallel between a powerless Russian mother bribing an official to get medical treatment for a sick child, or making an untrue political declaration to ensure that a child was not unfairly denied a college place, the sort of compromise frequently required in the Soviet era, with the chief of state of a major nuclear power sucking up to the front man for three or four hundred terrorist killers.

Clinton was by far the worse offender in this, but it always seemed to me to be very telling that the President of the United States was prepared to alter his schedule to accommodate the leader of a small and, er, disreputable Irish political party.

I am not sure whether Mr ‘Son of Bob’ is being deliberately obtuse, or genuinely cannot see the vast difference between the two things. Either way, it is a fatuous contribution.

Mr Pender makes a fair (if unwise, on his part) offer . He asks if I will admit I was mistaken if Mr Tappin now receives, as I fully expect him to, a speedy and fair trial.

Yes, I will, and readily. For what I expect to happen is that Mr Tappin will plead guilty (though he denies his guilt) and accept a lesser sentence, rather than risk financial ruin and a possible 35 years in prison. Thatsi the whole point of what I said about the Sixth Amendment being a dead letter.

Mr ‘Pender’(I omit the strange middle bit in his name) promises ‘ If for some reason he doesn't, then I'll gladly change my own tune accordingly.’

I’ll look forward to that. He will have to do so. Where can we reach him?

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27 February 2012 10:57 AM

I like Vladimir Putin. I wish I did not. But I cannot help it. I know that by saying so, I will trigger the lofty wrath of the right-thinking lobby which wants to portray modern Russia as the Evil Empire in a new Cold War. In that war, which they are trying so hard to start, they will see me as a traitor. But it is exactly because I love my own country that I can see the point of Mr Putin. He stands – as no other major leader does in the world today – for the rights of nations to decide their own business inside their own borders.He has underlined that by refusing to join in the rash American-backed effort to destabilise the Assad regime in Syria. He has dared to wield a real veto (unlike David Cameron’s disposable cardboard one) and face the consequences.He has used his country’s huge oil and gas reserves to maintain an independent state. And he has rejected the current mania for privatisation and market forces as the cure for all ills. Russia, he believes, has had quite enough privatisation. And that is why the searing beam of selective outrage is being turned on him by the global media and many Western foreign ministries, not to mention the ‘activists’ who roam the world deciding which governments are bad and which good.That is why you are being invited to rejoice at the anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow, while dozens of other equally justified protests in other countries go unreportedThat is why you are expected to hope that he is badly bruised in the presidential election next Sunday, March 4. It is why you will one day be invited to applaud some sort of mob revolution aimed at his overthrow.It may even succeed. If so, it will be followed by the usual disappointment. Who now cares about squalid Ukraine, whose ‘Orange Revolution’ was supposed to be a new dawn of humanity? But by the time their revolution goes sour, Mr Putin’s high-minded critics will have swivelled their searchlight on to another target. Russian corruption and repression will suddenly be acceptable and forgotten in a Moscow that will have been forced – – as it was in the Yeltsin years – to accept Western interference in its economy and around its frontiers.Let us not be blind here. Mr Putin is without doubt a sinister tyrant at the head of a corrupt government. His private life and wealth are a mystery. His personality cult – bare-chested tough-guy, horseman, diver, jet pilot – is creepy and would be laughable if it were not a serious method of keeping power. The lawless jailing of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky is his direct fault. The hideous death in custody of the courageous lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is a terrible blot on Putin’s thuggish state. The murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko are symptoms of the sickness of modern Russia. The general cynicism of the Russian government is breathtaking. It does all the things that men of power want to do in the rest of the world but daren’t because of restraints of law and custom. If you doubt that, look at the way Western states behaved during the ‘war on terror’.Meanwhile, who can deny that despotism and corruption are endemic in this sad, ravaged country?I should know. I spent two of the most important years of my life in Moscow when it was much, much worse. It was the very heart of an evil empire whose aims and ideas threatened the whole happiness of mankind.This is where, 22 years ago, I came to live in a dark and secretive building where my neighbours were KGB men and the aristocrats of the old Kremlin elite. Here, in this mysterious and often dangerous place, I saw what lies just beneath our frail and fleeting civilisation – bones, blood, death, injustice, despair, horror, loss, corruption and fear. I grasped for the first time how wonderfully safe and lucky I had been all my life in the unique miracle of freedom and law that is – or was – England.I learned to respect, above all, those who managed to retain some sort of integrity amid the knee-deep filth of communist Moscow. I also learned not to be too unkind to those who made compromises with it. I was there as a privileged person. Would I have been able to stay clean if I had lived as they did? Would you? I very much doubt it.I saw the last hammers and sickles pulled down, and the braziers full of smouldering Communist Party membership cards the day the all-powerful Party died. I saw the tanks trundle along my street as they tried to restore communism, and I saw them, and their cause, depart for ever. I witnessed oppressed peoples throw off Soviet rule. In the course of that struggle, I saw for the first time what a human head looks like after a bullet has passed through it, and also what a human face looks like when it is telling direct lies about murder.When I finally left, I was sure that a horrible fog of lies and perversion had been scoured from the surface of the earth when communism ended. I am confident that it will not come back. From now on, it is just Russia – heartbroken, ravaged, afraid, desperate and cruel, but no longer a menace to us. Nor is Putin’s frosty rule comparable to the gangster chaos of Boris Yeltsin – a drunken, debauched disaster that reduced millions of Russians to selling their personal possessions on the street to stay alive.It is not just me saying this. The distinguished Russian film director Stanislav Govorukhin – whose devastating documentary We Can’t Go On Living Like This helped end the communist era – is now working for Putin. He recalls that the Yeltsin era was ‘a thieving outrage, open plunder. Billions were stolen, factories and whole industry sectors. They destroyed and stole, they ground Russia into dust’.But, now, he says, ‘we have returned to “normal”, “civilised” corruption’.

This is, on the face of it, an astonishing thing to say. But most Russians readily understand it. Their country, almost always subject to absolute power, has been corrupt from its beginning. One of the greatest of pre-revolutionary Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, asked to sum up the character and story of his country and people, replied with just one word ‘Voruyut’ – ‘They steal’.But in the communist era, the state and the Party stole their private lives, their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers, and dragged them to death camps. And in the Yeltsin era, when Western ‘experts’ stalked the land, the nation’s rulers stole the whole country.I am not arguing in favour of this state of affairs, just pointing out that if the only alternative is even worse, you might see its advantages.But I can see no reason at all why Britain should seek to undermine Russia’s government.And I can see many reasons why we should in future be friends. One of them is that Vladimir Putin, alone of all the major national leaders of our times, refuses to be pushed around by supranational bodies.It would be good to see our own government doing the same thing. After all, how many of us are as keen as we used to be on the supposed cure-alls and blessings of human rights, privatisation, the United Nations, the European Union, open borders, political correctness and free trade?Mr Putin’s Russia is refreshingly free of these things. I suspect that private speech and thought are – paradoxically – more uncontrolled under Mr Putin’s iron tyranny than they are in liberal Britain.Russia also spotted long ago that the New Globalists – led by Anthony Blair – wanted to dissolve independent countries and replace them with dependent, subservient provinces in a New World Order.When that process pushed into Ukraine and the Caucasus, Putin angrily resisted, and was lied about by Western media and politicians as a result. To this day, a lot of people believe that Russia was in the wrong in its war with tiny Georgia in 2008.

In fact, Georgia’s leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, provoked a dangerous conflict in the hope of manoeuvring the United States into supporting him.Saakashvili, supposedly a democrat, came to power in a mob-bolstered putsch nauseatingly named ‘the Rose Revolution’.Since then he has used Putin-like methods to crush opposition. In November 2007 he sent his police on to the streets of Tbilisi to club and gas anti-corruption demonstrators, and shut an opposition TV station. But because he is on the side of globalism, his sins are unknown.This is what everyone should remember as they read and view the current wave of media unanimity about the evils of Vladimir Putin. The world is full of corrupt despotisms. But you never hear anything about most of them. The selective outrage about Russia pretends to be morally driven. It has another purpose.Here is an alternative report from Moscow, the one you won’t read anywhere else. Let its theme be the slogan on the smart, expensive banners of official pro-Putin demonstrations, most of whose participants are bribed or cajoled into attending

‘If not Putin, who?’

The same question has occurred to Anastasia, which is not the real name of a TV reporter who knows in nasty detail how censorship has operated for years in Russian broadcasting.So Anastasia, who regards freedom of speech in Putin’s Russia as an illusion, might be expected to be keen on the anti-Putin protests. Yet, much as she loathes the repression, she is ‘totally disappointed’ by the opposition, which is amateur and offers no serious alternative. When she stops to think about the future of her country, she sighs: ‘The only rational conclusion is despair.’She is – like many intelligent, informed Muscovites – unimpressed by and suspicious of Alexei Navalny, the fashionable Western-educated blogger who has made a name for himself by exposing corruption. Western liberals seldom mention Navalny’s other side, a caustic Russian nationalism that has led him into the sordid company of neo-Nazis. Westerners tend to accept his claim that a creepy video, in which he used the word ‘cockroaches’ to refer to terrorists from the Caucasus, is a joke.Some joke. While actual cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says in the 2007 recording, ‘for humans I recommend a pistol’.

Guardian readers and BBC types, currently lionising Navalny, would rightly cast him into outer darkness if he were an Englishman who held comparable views.The same point was made to me by Dmitry (I have decided not to use his surname), a worker for a Moscow small business, introduced to me by a Putin critic, and absolutely not a plant.‘Foreigners like meeting people who are protesting against something,’ he scoffs. ‘If I look at the whole political spectrum from Left to Right, I can see only one candidate to whom we can trust the future of my country, and that is Putin.’His main motivation is a hatred of the Western-dominated Yeltsin era, and a strong patriotic pride. Dmitry says Putin saved the integrity of the country by crushing the Chechen revolt – something Yeltsin tried and failed to do, with equal brutality but much less foreign criticism.‘In 1999, our country was on the edge of falling apart. If we had lost Chechnya, we could have lost the whole North Caucasus and been reduced in the end to a rump state of Muscovy. That would have been the end of Russia.’

We should not underestimate the feeling of wounded patriotism in a country which – not unreasonably – feels itself constantly vulnerable to invasion.Nor should we neglect the millions of older people who have – under Putin – received their pensions regularly, and been able to save without fear of inflation, thanks to the Moscow government’s prudent and astute use of oil revenues.The mother of an old friend of mine, a naval widow who lived most of her life in conditions of unbelievable Soviet drabness, now looks forward to regular holidays on Turkish Mediterranean beaches.As for corruption, Dmitry snorts at Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign. And, as so often, the loathed name of Boris Yeltsin comes up. He recalls Yeltsin, in the Eighties, as Moscow’s Communist Party boss, abandoning his chauffeured car, travelling on a crowded trolleybus and making a great show of his incorruptibility.‘It made him very popular. But he ended up as the most corrupt of all. He destroyed everything that was good from the Soviet times. It was wasted and given away. The gap between the very rich and the very poor was greater than ever.‘He ended up totally, totally corrupt and gave everything away to the oligarchs.’

To get the other view I visited Anna, a beautiful young mother, a member of Moscow’s gentle, bookish intellectual class.Like so many Muscovites, she lives her life behind a grey-painted steel front door that looks as if it has been cut from the armour-plating of a warship, and tells you more about the nervous, lawless reality of Russia than anything I can say.I asked her to answer that persistent question: ‘If not Putin, who?’And she could not. Instead she complained – with justice – that Putin has destroyed, or prevented the rise of, any serious challenger. ‘There is no adequate leader because the stage has been swept clean of rivals,’ she mourned. She did not dwell on the other side of this, that Russia’s liberals discredited themselves for ever by being associated with the hated Yeltsin years.Anna saw Navalny as inspiring, and a possible future challenger. She made light of his nationalism – even though people of her class and politics would normally loathe such views.It was frustrating to talk to Anna, so intelligent, so concerned for her country and worried about how her son would grow up under Putin’s iron rule.But she admitted that Putin’s nature had been clear for many years, and had not just suddenly emerged. He had crushed media dissent and rigged elections since he first came to power in 2002, yet nobody had complained. So why be so militant now?Anna and today’s protesters are, in fact, angry at their own past complacency.So they may well be. They are fine, admirable people and, in some unforeseeable future, I hope against hope they will get the Russia that they want. But this grim part of the planet is not like our secure, gentle island. Fear – fear of invasion, fear of chaos, fear of want – presses in from every direction. Fear is, in fact, normal. The best they can hope for is to neutralise it. Despots thrive on fear, for it gives them a pretext to gather power into their fists.When Russians get rid of their fear and scrap their armoured-steel front doors, they may be ready for an ordered, lawful and incorruptible free state. Until then, if not Putin, who?

25 February 2012 9:56 PM

What is the difference between extradition and kidnapping? I used to know, but I am no longer sure. Because an emotional spasm about ‘terrorism’ caused us to take leave of our senses, we are all now at the mercy of foreign governments that take a dislike to us.

In some cases we can be snatched from our homes and families because we are charged with actions which are not even crimes here.

In some cases we can be hauled away in manacles on the demand of some politically driven American prosecutor.

I used to admire American justice, but since the state-sponsored panic under George W. Bush, I am sadly disillusioned.

The penalty for daring to plead not guilty – certain financial ruin and a possible 35-year sentence – is so savage that the presumption of innocence, and jury trial itself, have been to all intents and purposes abolished. This means that the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution – which guarantees the right to a fair trial, and is one of the glories of America – has been violated and destroyed.

That is bad enough, but we shouldn’t forget our other, equally unforgivable surrender of national independence, the EU arrest warrant. Bulgarian justice, anyone? Both the new US-UK extradition treaty and the EU arrest warrant were rammed through Parliament on the basis that they would fight ‘terror’.

Wise and far-sighted questions were raised about this enormous change when it was first proposed. The heartbreaking case of Christopher Tappin (pictured above with wife Elaine), the British businessman extradited to America last week, against whom there seems to be nothing resembling evidence of wrongdoing or guilty intent, is exactly what its critics feared. This episode is so unfair that any proper British patriot must surely be moved to cold fury by it.

What is interesting is that while the problem has been obvious for years, nothing has been done about it.

Worse, authority has pretended that there is nothing to worry about. Sir Scott Baker’s recent report into extradition said complacently that there was ‘no significant difference’ between what the US needs to do to extradite one of ours, and what we need to do to extradite one of theirs.

Is that so?

It was not always the official position. Baroness Scotland, Home Office Minister of State, speaking in the House of Lords on the afternoon of December 16, 2003, made it quite clear that if we tried to extradite an American citizen we would in future be required to meet ‘a higher threshold than we ask of the United States, and I make no secret of that’.

In short, this is an unequal treaty, of the sort made between colonial powers and their powerless vassals, or between conquerors and their victims. Now, whenever the United States mounts its very high horse on the subject of terrorism, I think we must recall that it was the US that compelled this country to surrender to the terrorist murderers of the IRA.IT WAS President Bill Clinton who laundered the grisly and sinister Godfather Gerry Adams, giving him a visa and allowing him to spread his soapy propaganda and raise funds across the United States. President George W. Bush, Mr Anti-Terrorism himself, actually altered his schedule to fit in Mr Adams (who was too busy to make the original time) for a jolly St Patrick’s Day chinwag in the White House.

So put that in your Guinness and drink it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. If it’s terror you’re against, you know where to look for its supporters and sponsors.

Britain should – tonight if possible – withdraw from these unequal treaties, which are nationally humiliating, lawless and limitlessly dangerous.

If you must be rude, do it with style

I want to like Adele Adkins, but she is so coarse, I can’t. And if she has to make rude gestures, why does she need to use the awkward American one-finger salute instead of the traditional British V-sign, as majestically deployed recently in the Lords by Baroness Trumpington, fearsome widow of my old headmaster? Come to think of it, why don’t we order Lady Trumpington to steam to the Falklands at top speed? The Argentines wouldn’t dare attack if she was there.

Heroic Marie's death isn't an excuse for war

I am very sorry for the death of the reporter Marie Colvin, above, who was a woman of great courage and selflessness. But let it not become a pretext for yet another war of intervention. We have done enough harm in Libya – and I might add that the piteous state of Somalia is entirely the fault of foreign interference.

The question Cameron can't handle

I promised to tell you about David Cameron’s obdurate refusal to answer a simple question, and my long battle to squeeze the truth out of Downing Street.

My question concerned the Prime Minister’s very public withdrawal from his position as patron of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). He took this post (of course) before the last Election in time to pick up some Jewish votes. Many previous Premiers have held the same title, which involves no work but demonstrates continued high-level support in Britain for the state of Israel.

Pro-Arab and Islamic organisations, plus the usual angry anti-Israel campaigners, have worked hard to break this link. Meanwhile, British foreign policy under Mr Cameron has become quietly but firmly aligned to the needs and desires of ultra-Islamic Saudi Arabia – hence our mad aggression towards Iran, and curiously selective support of the bits of the Arab Spring that suit Saudi aims.

Muslim organisations in this country rejoiced (as, I am sure, did the Saudis) when Mr Cameron pulled out of the JNF.

It was obviously a huge snub to pro-Israel sentiment, and an attempt to grub votes for the Tories in Muslim areas. But a bland official statement (presumably worried about losing Jewish votes) maintained that it was the result of a routine review of the PM’s charity commitments. Several other charities were said to have been affected.

I simply asked which these charities were. And they would not tell me. After several months of to-ing and fro-ing, in which I had to involve the Information Commissioner, I began to wonder if they even existed. To this day, they won’t identify one of them.

But I can now name three estimable but politically unimportant charities affected, The Don’t Walk Away Campaign, United Estates Of Wythenshawe, and The Campaign For The University Of Oxford.

Downing Street wouldn’t tell me because it’s so obvious that these nice people, about whom Mr Cameron had once pretended to care, were casually thrown overboard to provide cover for a major political switch.

Samuel Hayek, chairman of the JNF, informs me that during early discussions on the proposed snub, he was told that Mr Cameron’s continued support caused ‘a conflict of interest’.

I’ll bet it did – a conflict of interest between sticking to a personal commitment freely made, and a series of unprincipled, sordid needs that emerged a bit later. We all know that kind of person. The instinctive oily slipperiness of this Prime Minister makes Anthony Blair look straightforward and reliable.

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23 February 2012 2:45 PM

Mr ’Bunker’ , if I have correctly understood him, is anxious for me to reprise a posting in which I demonstrated his amazing ability to contradict himself without ever realising he was doing so. I am pleased to oblige. It is an amazing talent, comparable to the ‘Boneless Wonders’ which used to be on display at fairgrounds. The thrilling thing about it is that the performer is apparently quite unaware of the contortions through which he puts himself, and at the end of the business believes he has done nothing extraordinary. He does himself an injustice. I have never seen anybody spend so long missing the point, or so willing to repeat the exercise.

Anyway, back we go to days, weeks months and years lost in the mists of time, to the 4th April 2011, at 9.57 am. The fog begins to clear, and emerging out of it we dimly descry these words, gradually growing clearer:

'Bunker Mentality Part Two - Mr 'Bunker' contradicts himself'

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air. But I wouldn't want this response of mine to Mr 'Bunker' to be confined only to the intrepid few who struggled all the way to the top of the last 'Bunker Mentality' thread, way above the tree line, into the high, parched zone where the oxygen is thin and altitude sickness strikes at the unwary.

So here it is again. I might subtitle it 'When 'Can't' means 'Won't':

'I think the best witness against Mr 'Bunker' is in fact himself. He makes my point so well, that I will here give him the opportunity to do so, in a selection of quotations from his earlier posts:

On Saturday (2nd April) he said:

'I have a position of absolute unbelief in gods. Absolutely.'

Three days before, he wrote :

'The truth is:- I am agnostic by your own definition - "one who acknowledges the possibility of God's existence" '.

The day before that :' I do acknowledge that it is possible that God exists. I do acknowledge that it is possible that God exists. I do acknowledge that it is possible that God exists. I have never said that his non-existence can be proved. Why? Because it can't. It is logically impossible.'

Three days before that:

'I'm at a loss as to why you introduce the compatibility of science and religion into the discussion. As far as I remember, I haven't mentioned science. (Actually he has. On 12th March he said :' Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the bible could not be true.') And I'm certainly not someone who thinks that science has all the answers. Far from it. '

He then hilariously states (first quoting me) :' Mr 'Bunker' ... denies any personal involvement in his own choice of belief." What? My "choice"? I thought we'd sorted that out long ago. You may have "chosen" a belief, a religious faith. I didn't. I couldn't. Because I found religion impossible to believe in.'

Why was that? We do not know. We cannot tell. And nor can Mr 'Bunker' seem to accept that 'impossible' is a word that permits of only one meaning, and it is not compatible with 'unlikely', 'improbable' or even 'incredible'. Yet he uses it as though it is. If he 'found it impossible' to believe, what was his reasoning for this finding? And if there wasn't any reasoning (and there is no evidence of any so far) my hypothesis, that it was his personal choice, comes lumbering over the horizon again.

But does he really deny the influence of personal preference over publicly stated opinions? Let us delve deeper onto the archive. We find (six days ago) Mr 'Bunker' acknowledging that motive and desire play some part in belief :'What a very odd business this "belief in God" (or gods) is. I ask myself - just what is the reason why obviously intelligent people go in for it. And actually believe it. Or - as I think may often be the case - say the[y] believe simply for opportunistic reasons. Why do some people believe - and others don't? '

A good question.

(Yet on 17th March the same Mr 'Bunker' (who now acknowledges that people may have reasons for their beliefs) had said :' I cannot CHOOSE to believe[r]. What an odd notion - choosing (!) to believe.')

A week ago, Mr Bunker was saying :' there were two positions open to me. I agree. But - as you will agree - I reached a considered opinion. To have opted for the other position was an impossibility for me in the light of my assessment of the evidence and probability. You perhaps call that "choosing". I call it being "forced" to adopt the only position left open to me. '

This confirms my stated point, that Mr Bunker is using terms appropriate to proof and truth for a decision which can only be based upon evidence and probability, and introducing possibility and impossibility into a question where they cannot be established. He also uses the term 'forced'. which means either that it was against his will or that facts and logic offered no alternative. Yet he has repeatedly accepted, during this discussion, that facts and logic alone cannot close the question.( I quote the precise words of Mr 'Bunker' :'I have never said that his non-existence can be proved. Why? Because it can't. It is logically impossible.')

On 21st March he was saying:' ...(If I remember rightly I said atheism was forced upon me. I didn't choose it.) Well I'm afraid you've got it wrong - once more. You shouldn't be asking "who", but "what" forced me ... And the answer is quite simple. Circumstances forced me. Intellectual honesty with myself. The inability to believe something which I found impossible to believe. -- Is that clear now? - Yes? '

Well, no, not to me it isn't. How can someone be 'unable' to believe in the existence of something whose non-existence he himself says cannot be logically established (see 'Bunker' above, passim)?

On 19th March he had said: 'I have not chosen unbelief. If I may say sloppily, unbelief has been forced upon me.'

This was shortly after he had proclaimed: ' If we continue this discussion on religion/belief/atheism on the basis of logical and rational argument, I shall win. For the simple reason that I have logic and reason on my side.' and ' I, an atheist, am not illogical.'

Not long before this, he had said :' When I say I believe there is no God, I am stating my considered opinion, a very firm conviction admittedly. But not absolute certainty.'

This would appear to me to be a direct contradiction of his recent statement that :''I have a position of absolute unbelief in gods. Absolutely.' '

I would add here that , since I posted this comment, Mr 'Bunker' has been whizzing around like a dying bluebottle on a windowsill, in smaller and smaller, and more and more erratic loops, to which my only response is to smile indulgently. While his ally, Mr Wooderson has been amusing us with the distinction between actual impossibility ( ie real impossibility, which is actually impossible) and something he terms 'psychological' impossibility, ie not impossibility at all, but a groundless conviction of impossibility lodged in the Atheist mind, resting on the prejudices, desires, wishes and fears of the individual.’

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I did not know Marie Colvin, though I have certainly seen her across crowded rooms, usually at award ceremonies (I try as hard as I can to avoid war zones) and couldn’t possibly have been unaware of her extraordinary bravery and persistence. There’s no doubt she lived an admirable life, and demonstrated real courage. I think I disagree with her view of the world in general, but I also think her decision to stay behind with a group of potential massacre victims in East Timor was so powerfully selfless that it deserves an actual monument.

I have known other reporters – in more than one notable case also women – who have a similar disregard for physical danger, and in some cases (let this not be denied) an actual joy in venturing into high, hard remote places where danger and discomfort are certain. There are some, often photographers, who are exhilarated greatly by the noise and fear of battle. I rather envy them. I have enough imagination to know why they enjoy it and why they yearn for the summons to the war zone. But I have too much imagination, and too much fondness for my own skin, to follow them.

I’ve mentioned before that in a long newspaper career I have, almost inevitably, blundered into one or two war zones. I never meant to. Once, a prosaic trip to record the slow takeover of East Germany by the West led, by a series of wholly unpredictable but unavoidable steps, to going from East Berlin to Budapest, from Budapest to Szeged, and then to my crossing into Romania just before Christmas 1989. I think my then office just took the view that as I was already half-way there, I might as well keep going as it was cheaper. I swallowed hard and duly kept going. The best part of it was the leaving - I did what I had for many years longed to do, went down to the station and got on the first train out, not caring where it went as long as it was somewhere else.There were no tickets. As it happened, it took me (in the company of the highly civilsied and hospitable members of a Russian orchestra) through the lovely mountains of Bulgaria to Sofia, which seemed like Paris afetr Bucharest.

Most of what I saw in Romania now seems farcical – Romanians were given to exaggeration and weeping hysteria. But luckily I didn’t believe the tales of horror I was told in the border town of Arad, about what lay ahead on the road to Bucharest (actually I took the train, which ran to time and which I reckoned would be safer by far than a car if the reports, delivered with much wailing and gesticulation, of Secret Police helicopters strafing the roads were in fact true).

I am not at all ashamed to admit that I (literally) hid under my bed when shooting broke out just outside my Bucharest Hotel. I was in the middle of a long-awaited phone call to my home when it started, so I couldn’t pretend to my wife that all was calm. But under the bed was the place to be. I could see through the uncurtained windows the tracer streaking about the place, and I’d read enough accounts of lives ended by stray bullets to conclude that this was the only sensible thing to do. I’d do it again, too. As it turned out, the shooting was meaningless, done for show and not a battle at all, but I didn’t learn that till later.

But the following day I went to visit one of the Bucharest hospitals, and there saw quite a lot of people, in dirty beds, swathed in stained bandages, horribly pale, who had been hit by bullets, stray or otherwise. I imagined myself as one of them, and inwardly swore to do all in my power to avoid it for as long as I lived.

So imagine my feelings a bit more than a year later when, in Vilnius to report on Lithuania’s peaceful secession from the USSR, I was attending a dull and worthy press conference and a shouting person rushed into say that the Soviet Army had begun shooting people. So they had (my account of this miserable episode is to be found in ‘The Cameron Delusion’) . I can’t say I hurried with any enthusiasm to the scene. The same was true of my unintended landing in Somalia, just before Christmas 1992 (these things always seem to happen in the very dead of winter) which I describe in ‘The Rage Against God’. I also got into some bad trouble in the Congo a few years ago, the only one of these occasions when I have had a pretty strong sense that I might actually be about to die (though I had a more concentrated terrifying moment while riding my bicycle through Peckham and nearly being trapped between a lorry and its trailer, when I really *did* think that I was about to die and felt strong physical terror).

So it’s not for me. Is that why I also tend to resist the reporter’s justification for doing these things - that we must bear witness, and expose the misdeeds of tyrants. Why must we? In what way is a reporter qualified to decide the rights and wrongs of what he or she, for a few days or hours, witnesses as an outsider who often doesn’t even know the local alphabet, and needs an interpreter to tell him which is the gents and which the ladies? On this basis he can conclude that the rebels are right, and the government is wrong? Well, hardly, yet this is what is increasingly allowed, and encouraged to happen.

In a way I wouldn’t mind if it were sustained. But the pattern is always the same – a great deal of coverage designed to encourage international pressure and/or intervention. Plentiful coverage of the intervention or ‘revolution’ up to its ‘success’ . Then silence. I can remember when BBC News bulletins were dominated every night by South Africa. Yet how often do we now hear a word about what is going on there? Iraq is barely covered. After the wild euphoria of Tahrir Square, detailed coverage of what has followed in Egypt has been comparatively sketchy and infrequent. As for Libya, the failure by most media organisations to record the scandalous outcome of Western intervention is an active disgrace. Libya is fast becoming a failed state, with criminal gangs roaming unchecked and racially-bigoted arbitrary arrests and mass torture worryingly frequent and unrestrained. This is what we helped to bring about with our ill-informed enthusiasms. Shouldn’t we at least be more interested?

There’s another sort of selectivity as well. Pro-Israel journalists such as me have known for years about the Syrian government’s tendency to murder its citizens, particularly the great 1982 Hama massacre under Hafez Assad, since when the ‘West’ has several times attempted to make Syria into its ally. But the mass of the press corps seldom if ever mentioned these things concentrating as they were on the villainies of Israel next door. And then of course there’s Bahrain, where the furious repression of Shia protestors has by and large been forgotten, and doesn’t seem to worry William Hague half as much as similar action in Syria.

Hitchens’s Rule of Outrage for Foreign Ministries and Journalists states ‘Where outrage is selective, it’s not genuine. It may therefore have a purpose which has little to do with compassion, and much to do with politics and diplomacy’.

This of course does not mean that brave journalists shouldn’t do their jobs, or that their courage should be demeaned. But those who read what they write, or watch their reports on TV, should always ask why this particular crisis, this particular country, has attracted attention and coverage, while others, similar if not worse, go ignored. It costs a lot of money to send a reporter to a war zone. Someone has to decide when it is worth it, and when it is not. How and why are these decisions taken?

A pouple of responses on ‘Old England’, particularly to ‘Darren W’. I am not claiming any sort of privilege. Nor do I believe in any such thing as ‘Good Old days’. I have to repeat every few weeks here that I do not believe there ever was a ‘Golden Age’ because people insist on attributing this view to me, which I don’t hold. My main point is that England was a different place before these changes, as foreign to its current inhabitants as Belgium or Portugal. The steam trains and the greyness stand as symbols of a much greater difference. It really, really was different . As to why my generation made such a mess of it, that is what I have spent four books trying to explain and recount. I urge him to read them, if he’s really interested.

He is right that 1914 was the moment it all came to an end, but things don’t instantly alter at such moments. In 1959, there was still a lot of pre-1914 England left, you could talk to people who grew up in it, experience manners and customs which dated from before 1914 and see towns and villages which had changed little since those times. Now you can’t. I reckon the last doors closed around 1970. I was there. I know how different it was. I think those who live now should be aware of it. ‘We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long’.

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22 February 2012 2:50 PM

John O’Sullivan, that fine writer, has published an interesting reminiscence of my brother Christopher in ‘National Review Online’ which is friendly without being sycophantic or actually slobbering (as some of the eulogies have, alas, been) and is all the better for that. A little searching online will easily find it. There are a number of interesting points in it, but one that I found most interesting was this. ‘Christopher also admits that he had been born into — and shaped by — the last generation of old England. For most of his journalistic career, he had embraced causes and ideas inimical to that distant country. That England had been badly and unfairly managed in various ways; he did not apologize for opposing them. But it had its virtues and, now that it was vanishing, he knew he would miss it — that England of the stiff upper lip, emotional self-control, the Royal Navy (and its campaign against slavery), the instilling and maintenance of high educational standards, lively and free debate — and, not least, chivalry towards the fair sex.’

Leaving aside any other issues, the phrase ‘the last generation of old England’ applies just as strongly to me. We were just in time. Partly because of our Navy background( for the services maintain tradition after civilian society has abandoned it), and partly because of our now unthinkable boarding-school experiences on the edge of Dartmoor, we saw, smelt, heard, savoured and absorbed an England that has now completely gone.

A few examples. We rode, thinking it normal, on trains hauled by steam locomotives. We learned by heart the customary measures of our country, sixteen ounces make a pound, 14 pounds make a stone, eight stone make a hundredweight, etc. We sang hymns ancient and modern. We were sent out to play games in the cold and the wet. We expected to be busy all the time, even on holiday there always had to be something to do. I noticed in John Masters’s book Bhowani Junction – and I intend to write more about Masters on another occasion – the narrator of one passage noting that the British officer class were always busy ‘in those days’, ‘those days’ being the 1940s. We were brought up with the same attitude. If there was ‘spare time’, you were jolly well expected to make use of it. Given that my headmaster had, amongst other things, devised the British Army’s standard-issue ammunition box, I suppose we should have expected no less. Many a Saturday afternoon was spent busily clearing brushwood, picking stones from new playing fields or polishing things. Oddly enough, it was rather enjoyable and we would have a glow of satisfaction afterwards.

All this fitted into a calendar and a physical landscape quite different from what we now know. I think some elements of it are half-recreated in the TV series ‘Call the Midwife’ , which cunningly drains the colour from so many of its scenes. You had to be a lot more patient, both in the short term and the long term. I still remember being shocked when the first credit cards were introduced to this country, under the slogan ‘It takes the waiting out of wanting’.

I reckoned that no good would come of such an arrangement. You had to wait for what you wanted. And I seem to have been right.

In those times, Anglican Christianity also had a considerable hold on national life. Even if people didn’t take part in its services, they knew what they were and when they happened. For instance, I am fairly sure that most people would have known that today, 22nd February, was Ash Wednesday and known that the Litany ( a rather beautiful if fearsome penitential service) would be read in church that day. The rather Roman Catholic habit of holding Communion services with ‘imposition of ashes’ would have been regarded as a bit foreign in the England of my childhood.

And corporate bodies, colleges, judges, Government minters and so forth, would probably have made some effort to turn up. Now, I have the great good fortune to live in Oxford, a city where the past can still be found hiding in various shaded and secluded corners, so I was pleased to gather that the Litany was to be read early this morning at Magdalen College Chapel. I thought there might at least be some sort of shadowy official presence, a few dons in the pews. Choral Evensong at Magdalen, on Saturday or Sunday evening is one of the great glories of Oxford, and indeed of England.

But as it happened I was the only member of the congregation, apart from the estimable College chaplain and his wife, in the half-lit glories of that superb room. The three of us made a reasonable fist of things ( the Litany requires a back-and-forth series of versicles and responses and couldn’t really be read by a Minister on his own) . I left, as I often do leave Prayer Book services, with my head ringing with poetry and my temporal mind thoroughly disturbed by the different rhythms of the eternal.

But it struck me as worth mentioning that this great Anglican ceremony, which is full of mighty poetry and 50 years ago would have been a recognised part of many people’s Ash Wednesdays, has now dwindled almost to the point of vanishing.

Actually I don’t have any great passion *against* Paul McCartney, as some readers have suggested. I just think his sort of thing is a very poor substitute for the beauties of the former culture, just as a concrete college piazza at some ‘Uni’ or other is a poor substitute for an Oxford quadrangle or a Cambridge court.

Let those who enthuse about ‘In My Life’ by the way, try comparing it (or any of the works of McCartney) with Philip Larkin’s ‘Whitsun Weddings’ . Larkin, like Robert Frost and W.B.Yeats, is proof that the modern world can produce great poetry.

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20 February 2012 11:16 AM

When will people learn? I am grieved to see still more innocent, well-intentioned contributors, armed with logic, hurl themselves on to the rocky beaches of ‘Bunker Island’, that logic-free fastness. These are pointless suicide missions. I beg them not to continue. The rest of us have to watch in horror as they are needlessly cut to pieces by Mr Bunker’s awful little jokes about Goblins and Santa Claus, or prostrated by his amazing power to bore, which causes seagulls to drop out of the sky round his shores, stunned into insensibility by the repetitive tedium of his latest imaginary triumph.

They really must grasp that within range of Mr ‘Bunker’ a mysterious force field operates which renders logic inoperable. I suspect that Mr ‘Bunker’ keeps this force-field going with an enormous solipsism machine deep in his, er, bunker. This itself is powered by a combination of vanity and of the corpses of the many logical arguments which have died, fallen to the ground and decayed on this inhospitable shore. I suspect that without the outside stimulation, it wouldn’t be able to sustain itself.

I note that (having been de-bunked yet again without noticing it) Mr Bunker is now bizarrely changing the subject , trying to construct an inconsistency in my critical view of Bertrand Russell’s Victorian Cambridge scorn for religion (a position developed, and common among intellectual snobs, in the days of the paddle steamer) and of my favourable citation of Albert Einstein’s non-specific views on Theism. He says the two men were of a similar age.

This is perfectly true, but so what? Russell was a mathematician and philosopher. Einstein was a physicist. Russell’s views were formed in late-Victorian Cambridge, well before the discoveries which made Einstein famous and which make his observations on cosmology interesting. Mr ‘Bunker’ also says (I’ll take him on trust, solely for the purpose of this argument, lacking time to look up the details) that ‘Russell, the leading logician, mathematician and philosopher, was agnostic in the sense that he "couldn't know", but was just as atheistic as I in the sense that he was devoid of any belief in supernatural beings’.

Thus Mr ‘Bunker’, who defies logic for every waking hour of every waking day by inventing an inexplicable and unsustainable ‘impossibility’ to justify a certainty he otherwise cannot support, has such a hilarious lack of self-knowledge that he actually equates himself with Bertrand Russell.

Now, Russell and Einstein were undoubtedly geniuses. But is Paul McCartney one? Daniel McKean thinks he is. He says :’ The band that brought us 'She's Leaving Home', 'Here, There and Everywhere', 'Something', 'Penny Lane', 'Tomorrow Never Knows', 'In My Life' and so on are certainly not 'trivial'. McCartney himself is undoubtedly a genius; a deeply gifted songbird whose melodies have been recycled by hundreds of thousands across the globe and studied by classical musicians as well as 'pop' musicians. If the Beatles music is so trivial, why is it that each time their music is released on the latest technological format, their sales increase and break more records, decades later?

There are several points here. What is about these songs that Mr McKean thinks is so marvellous? Can he cite the particular elements of them that rise to the level of ‘genius’? Can he explain why they are works of ‘genius’?. Also, does he really believe that mass sales are themselves a sign of quality? Many trivial things, pitched to appeal to a mass market, sell plenty. Does that make them good, let alone works of genius?

I am well aware that many people like the Beatles. If it were not so, then they would not have become rich and famous. The question is whether their renown is based on a lasting quality, or on that fickle and evanescent thing, well-marketed popularity. People get angry, rather than argue reasonably, when I raise the possibility that the Beatles are forgettable and will be forgotten (except in the way that famous stars of the past are remembered for being famous in their time, though their appeal is now incomprehensible). Merely to hold the view that the Beatles may not last is a sort of dissident position. What’s more , neither side can be certain of the outcome.

Now, as one who remembers his first sight of the Beatles (and what an odd name that is, if you think about it) in their neat uniforms on some early-evening TV show in the early sixties, and can recall such works as ‘Love me Do’ .Twist and Shout’ and ‘I wanna hold your ha-a-a-and’ when they were freshly-pressed 45-rpm records in rough paper sleeves, retailing at seven shillings and fourpence a go, I have always been puzzled by the way they never went away again afterwards. And I am also puzzled by the way they became intellectually respectable, pretentiously praised by critics who, it seemed to me, saw which way the wind was blowing. There were scores of such groups at that time. They are almost all forgotten.

The thing that seemed to distinguish the Beatles from the others was that they had the power to produce a worrying hysteria in girls aged about 14 or 15. These girls, screaming, often made it quite impossible for anyone to hear the Beatles at their live concerts (but as they dominated the audiences nobody seemed to mind). It was on that strange, unexamined hysteria, that –in my view - their exceptional success was based.

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18 February 2012 10:14 PM

Paul McCartney, who was a popular singing star many years ago and is for some unfathomable reason treated as if he is a serious person, tells us that he thinks the Monarchy is ‘an amazingly old-fashioned affair’.

In that case, I had better call him Mr McCartney. For if he thinks kings and queens are outdated, he must feel the same way about knighthoods, not to mention the MBE that he was careful to cite when he so irresponsibly called for cannabis to be legalised back in the old-fashioned Sixties.

Mr McCartney is much more outdated than the Monarchy. I don’t just mean that anyone listening today to the works of The Beatles must be puzzled and embarrassed that such trivial stuff plunged millions of teenage girls into shrieking hysteria.

I mean that his political views are much the same as those of a student revolutionary of half a century ago, or of a BBC executive (much the same thing). During the past 40 years or so, republics haven’t exactly distinguished themselves, have they?

Apartheid South Africa was a republic. East Germany was a republic. Iran and Iraq are republics. North Korea is a republic. Republican America searched through more than 200 million citizens for a President and came up with . . . George W. Bush.

Yet among the small number of the longest-lasting free, law-governed countries in the world, most are monarchies. This fact would make an adult think.

But like so many children of the Sixties – and children is the right word – Mr McCartney has generally preferred fashionable beliefs to independent thought.

After all, what grown-up, informed person would call for the legalisation of a drug whose users so often end up suffering from incurable mental illness?

The busy, well-funded pro-cannabis lobby will no doubt say that the connection has yet to be definitively proved. The fact so many cannabis users end up tragically mentally ill, or that mental illness has increased since cannabis use became widespread, is not enough for them.

The tobacco lobby used to spread the same complacent story about cigarettes and lung cancer – in fact, they did so for about 30 wasted years, during which many thousands of people were fooled into thinking that smoking was safe.

By the time they found that it wasn’t, they were already dying in pain in the cancer ward, or ravaged by heart disease and emphysema.

The only good news is that Mr McCartney has announced that he has at last given up smoking cannabis. Why? Not because of our allegedly cruel drug laws, anyway. Possession of this substance is supposed to be illegal, and Mr McCartney has made no secret of his taste for it, but British police have taken no action against him for 40 years.

So I wonder why he has given up? It is supposed to be because he is worried about the effect on his youngest daughter, Beatrice, aged eight.

But what about his other, older, children? Wasn’t he just as concerned about them? Whatever the reason, let us hope that, once the greasy fumes of years have cleared away, he realises how much harm he has done by his espousal of this poison and joins the campaign to make it properly illegal again.

There are children now in school, the same age as Beatrice, who may be saved from life in the locked ward of the mental hospital, if he will only recognise that he was wrong..

Policing the forces of tyrannyIn January 2007, I wrote this about the arrest of Anthony Blair’s aide Ruth Turner in the pursuit of the supposed ‘cash for honours’ scandal: ‘Still, silly people are rejoicing over the arrest of New Labour’s Ruth Turner.

This is wrong, dangerous and short-sighted. Just because this creepy totalitarian method has been used against someone you don’t like, it doesn’t mean it’s right. What you do to others will eventually be done to you. If you unleash the police as a political weapon, then you have authorised their use against your own side.

‘One day, when you are whimpering amid the wreckage of your ransacked home or having your DNA swabbed and your dabs taken at the behest of your political enemies, you will complain. And they will reply, “Where were you when they did this to Ruth Turner?” And they will be right.’

The job of the police is to patrol on foot, preventing crime and disorder. If they cannot or will not do that, we would be better off without them. Once they attach themselves to political causes – like the current liberal elite campaign against press independence – they are a monstrous engine of tyranny.

And today in Dictionary Corner... Trevor PhillipsTrevor Phillips, chief commissar of our embryo Thought Police, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, says Christianity is fine in church, but not if its beliefs conflict with the stern will of the liberal state.

He says those who want Britain to stay Christian are like Muslims who want sharia law. That’s what he means by ‘equality’. The ancient religion of this country on which its laws and freedoms are based is now ‘equal’ with Islam.

Now, we do not need to wait for the barbarians. We are so busy enjoying ourselves that we cannot even pass on the basics of civilisation to the next generation.

Teachers report that children arrive at school aged five, still wearing nappies and unable to speak properly. They come from prosperous homes filled with gadgets and – of course – TV sets.

I first warned of this back in 1996, when the long, mad, ultra-feminist campaign to persuade women that bringing up their own children was demeaning and unworthy of them had finally succeeded.

By Christmas 1997, Britain’s female workforce outnumbered the male workforce for the first time. This wasn’t because everyone suddenly agreed with loopy old trouts like Betty Friedan, or anti-marriage fanatics such as Germaine Greer – but because big employers realised that women were much easier to exploit than men.

So off they all marched to work in call centres or banks or human-rights law firms, and their babies were left to whimper in day orphanages and dumped drooling in front of TV screens. Year by year, we pay a higher price for this. What sort of children will these children have?

Where there's a Willetts...Nothing succeeds like failure. Turning British secondary schools into comprehensives was an educational and social disaster almost without parallel.

So now we have decided to do the same thing to our universities. Equality of outcome is to replace equality of opportunity, and politics is to override education.

Professor Les Ebdon, friend of the Mickey Mouse degree, is to be appointed to help achieve this aim.

Can we please stop pretending that this act of national suicide is the responsibility of Liberal Democrat Vince Cable alone? Equally to blame is that most useless of Tories, David Willetts.